Peter Farb - Human Quotes

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Millions of dollars have been expended to excavate and transport to museums the tools, weapons, and other artifacts of Indians—but scarcely a penny has been spent to save the living descendents of those who made them. Modern man is prompt to prevent cruelty to animals, and sometimes even to humans, but no counterpart of the Humane Society or the Sierra Club exists to prevent cruelty to entire cultures.

Peter Farb
Culture is all the things and ideas ever devised by humans working and living together.

Peter Farb
Social scientists of the past spoke glibly of an "agricultural revolution," a time during which human populations suddenly soared, cities were founded, and many trappings of civilization made their appearance.... The food-production revolution turns out to be a slow evolution, a long period of experimentation rather than a sudden explosion.

Peter Farb
A central assumption of this book has been that to examine the experience of humans throughout their 25,000 years on this continent is to hold up a mirror to the culture of Modern America.

Peter Farb
In the far north, where humans must face the constant threat of starvation, where life is reduced to the bare essentials—it turns out that one of these essentials is art. Art seems to belong to the basic pattern of life of the Eskimo, and of the neighboring Athapaskan and Algonkian Indian bands as well.

Peter Farb
The environment does not determine the character of human culture; it merely sets the outer limits.

Peter Farb
In 1830... Joseph Smith... prophesied that a New Jerusalem would arise in the wilds... The Mormons sent emissaries to the Indians, whom he renamed the Lamanites, inviting them to join the Mormon colonies and to be baptized. Joseph Smith was also to have prophesied in 1843 that if he... lived until 1890—the messiah would appear in human form.... It was in 1890 that... Wovoka appeared and began teaching the [revitalized] Ghost Dance religion.

Peter Farb
A human being cannot survive alone and be entirely human. It is through the nature of their social and political institutions that the differences and similarities among cultures are to be accounted for.

Peter Farb
An isolated human in a simple society is usually a dead human...

Peter Farb
Experiments... have shown that at least one aspect of human thought—memory—is strongly influenced by language.

Peter Farb
No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

Peter Farb